History
Former journalist Daniel Edelman founded the public relations firm in 1952 just down the hall from its first client, Toni Home Permanent Co. (now a division of Gillette) with only three staff and a retainer budget of $500 a month.
By 1960, the firm had about 25 accounts, including the country of Finland. Edelman retired as CEO in 1996 at the age of 76. His son and current CEO Richard Edelman continued in his father's footsteps. Daniel's other children John and Renee also held high positions in the company. In 1997, Richard made it public that they had received purchasing offers from two of the company's biggest competitors, and that they turned them down. Edelman would remain the only private firm amongst the top ten by revenue.
In 1978 Daniel Edelman had an opportunity to sell the company, but instead persuaded his son, Richard Edelman, to work for the company for "just a year."
By the early 2000s, Edelman had about $210 million in revenue with almost a quarter of it coming from Europe. Industry consolidation among competitors however, made several conglomerate competitors much bigger.
The early 2000s marked the pop of the so-called "dot-com boom," which Edelman had become particularly vested in. Edelman's considerable client base in consumer technology was impacted by the economy, but they also diversified into healthcare, finance, and other high-growth sectors.
Read more about this topic: Edelman (firm)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)